


Kings Among Runaways

by within_a_dream



Category: On the Bus Mall - The Decemberists (Song)
Genre: M/M, Underage Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 23:00:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1796446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/pseuds/within_a_dream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will could never say no to Devon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kings Among Runaways

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ghosthorse_tracks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghosthorse_tracks/gifts).



“Let’s get out of here.”

Will could see that look in Devon’s eyes, the one that meant he was about to do something stupid that Will would have to fix. “Where to? Should we hop a bus to Vegas, learn how to count cards? Or maybe we can thumb a ride to New York, make it big on Broadway.”

“I’m serious, Will. I can’t stay here any longer.”

He’d seen those assholes at school shoving Devon around again today. Normally Devon shrugged it off, but Will should’ve realized something was wrong when Devon went straight home after school. He normally stayed as far away from his family as possible, as long as possible. And now he was standing in the hallway outside Will’s apartment at eleven at night, running his mouth about some crazy plan or another.

“You want to spend the night at my place? I can call your family.”

“Let’s leave. Together.”

Will almost laughed, picturing them running off into the night like something out of an old movie. Thank God he caught himself when he realized Devon was serious. He knew better than to laugh when Devon was smiling like he was one frayed thread away from going Michael Myers on someone. Not even because he’d swing from manic happiness to rage before Will could blink, but because of the crushing disappointment he knew would follow close after, the refusal to answer texts and the stubborn refusal to make eye contact when they passed each other at school. “And go where?” Will hated himself for the sarcasm that crept into that question.

“We can sleep in the park. It’s warm out. Just until we save some money, then we can rent a room somewhere. I’ve got a bag packed already.” Devon’s smile started to crack. “You’re not coming, are you?”

“God, Devon. Just…give me a sec, all right? Let me get some stuff together.” Will couldn’t let Devon walk off on his own like this. It’d just be one night, and he’d be sick of sleeping on benches. “Did you even tell your mom you’re leaving?”

“She doesn’t need me. She’s got Ed.” There was that edge to his voice that came up whenever he mentioned his brother. “Hurry up, or your parents will see us.”

“All right, all right.” Just one night, he promised himself. One night, and he was coming home. As much as he hated the parents who barely acknowledged his existence, and the classmates who he wished wouldn’t acknowledge his existence, it was better than sleeping in a box in some alley, even if that box was where his only friend had decided to live. Swear to God, he’d be home in a night.

~~~

He should have known that it was never just one night with Devon. It took a week for Will to realize that if he wanted to go home, he’d be going home alone, but he should have realized the night Devon showed up at his door. Going home would be admitting defeat, and Devon never lost. So they fell asleep propped up against each other on a park bench, and woke up stiff with cold and somehow more tired than they’d been the night before, but after the first night the ache in Will’s bones went away (or maybe he got used to it). They dodged the glances of men with wolfish smiles, and after a while the ache in the pit of Will’s stomach when their eyes met his went away. Then they stopped dodging the glances, and after the first few times, being forced up against a wall or a sink or a Dumpster in exchange for a handful of crumpled bills stopped making Will feel so filthy.

He kept going, reminding himself that the first times were always the worst. It could only get better from here, and besides, it was too late to go home. What was he going to say? ‘Hey, Dad, sorry I’ve been gone for a month. I was out in the city sucking cocks for money with Devon, but at least I’m home now, right?’ Each day, his old life felt more like a dream, separated by miles and miles of dark alleys and hands on his ass.

Will didn’t tell Devon that. He’d probably laugh, make some joke about how that was the _point_ of all of this. In Devon’s eyes, they were living like princes. Sometimes Will wondered what Devon’s brother had done that made sleeping in a park and selling himself to strangers seem better than going home, but it was better not to ask. At least Devon was happy. He never shut up about how great this was, how someday soon they were going to save enough money to rent a room of their own and then they’d _really_ be living like kings. A joke or a pipe dream, Will couldn’t tell which, because as far as he could tell they were barely scraping together enough money to eat.

That was Devon, half jokes and half wild dreams, and Will could never bring himself to tear him down. At least one of them could laugh at the cold nights and the old men--and Devon usually dragged Will into giggles as well, even if he didn’t always see the joke. He could spend hours listening to Devon spin a bad trick into a goddamned comedy routine, like there was nothing funnier than some old man who couldn’t get it up.

Devon had a special grin, one that meant he couldn’t wait to tell Will something. They’d meet back up in the park in the morning, and Devon would grin, and Will smiled back and asked, “How bad?”

This morning, Devon tried to hide his smile. “He only gave me half what we agreed on. Like it’s _my_ fault he couldn’t get it up.”

“What a dick!”

Devon managed to pull his smile down. “Don’t be rude, Will. That man was an angel.”

“Oh, really?”

“He still gave us enough to rent a room.”

Will barely managed to register what Devon meant when he swept him into a hug. “You’re kidding.”

“No more benches for us, baby!”

Sometimes, Will felt like everything was worth it, just to see Devon that happy.

~~~

“We’re kings of the world!” Devon half-tackled Will into a hug, spinning him around and nearly swinging him into the scuffed wooden dresser at the end of the bed.

“Yeah, if by ‘the world’ you mean ‘a rat-trap motel room that rattles every time a car drives by.’” Will couldn’t keep the smile off his face, though. Devon was honest-to-God in love with every square inch of stained carpet in this dump.

“This place is a goddamned palace. And it’s all ours.”

“Have fun being King of the Cockroaches, then.”

“Are you insulting my domain?” Sometimes Devon got this smile on his face, like he was daring you to bring him down. He had it on now, and Will couldn’t help but laugh at the combination of his goofy grin and fake-ass British accent.

“You really want to be king of this place, you can have at it.”

“Hey, I’m serious.” The idiot couldn’t even stop laughing long enough to get that sentence out. “If you’re gonna talk like that to your lord and sovereign, I’ll have to…challenge you to a duel or something.”

“Oh, really?”

Without warning, Devon tackled Will, pinning him to the bed. “Take back your insults, foul knave!”

Will tried to push him off, but Devon had a surprisingly strong grip for such a runt. “Fine, I take it back! We live in Buckingham fucking Palace, all right?”

Devon rolled off of Will. “And I’m the prince.”

“As long as I don’t have to wear one of those frilly pink princess dresses.”

“There’s room for two princes, I think.”

Will was going to say something in reply, but he couldn’t think of anything except the way Devon’s lips parted just a little when he wasn’t talking, and they suddenly felt too close together, lying face-to-face on the stained comforter noses barely an inch apart.

“From where I’m sitting, there’s barely room for one.” Will sat up and leaned back against the bedframe, hoping the silence had been shorter than it’d felt. “My closet at home was bigger than this.”

Devon flopped onto his stomach so he was facing Will. “Yeah, but we’ve got this place to ourselves. I don’t have to listen to my bastard brother talk to me ever again.” He shivered.

“Come sit by me, if you’re cold.” Devon wasn’t cold, and they both knew it, but he slid up to a seat next to Will anyway. He leaned against Will’s shoulder, and they pulled the comforter up around their necks and didn’t talk for a while. Will was still just a bit too aware of Devon’s skin against his, but he didn’t want to move and shatter the moment.

“You know what he said, about you?”

“Your brother?” Devon didn’t talk about his family much. Will knew what to say and what to avoid to keep Devon from exploding on any other topic, but this was like running through a field full of land mines.

“He said that if you ever found out about me, you’d hate me, and I’d have no one left.”

“Find out what, what a dork you are? Too late for that.”

“No, about…” Devon paused, thinking for a bit. This was serious, then. Normally he’d talk a mile a minute. “What I think about you.”

“We’re friends, Devon. You can’t change that.”

“What if I want to?” And with that, Devon leaned in close enough for their lips to meet, more hesitant than he’d been since Will had met him, and Will found himself thinking he’d like to change things, too.

~~~

Will couldn’t sleep that night, sharing a suddenly too-small bed with a boy he might be in love with. Devon was out the second his head hit the pillow, of course, and within the hour he was flailing around, taking up most of the mattress. Every time Will began to drift off, the brush of skin against skin jolted him awake. First Devon’s hand brushed his back, then Devon’s leg twisted around his own, and then, just as the sun was starting to glare through the curtains, Devon curled up against him and muttered something unintelligible in his ear. Will had the feeling that if he moved even a little, he’d ruin everything. He held as still as he could manage, the rise and fall of Devon’s chest against his back making him giddier than it should.

It wasn’t like they hadn’t shared a bed before. Hell, he and Devon had spent half the summer tangled together on Will’s bed, probably half the size of the hotel queen, after one of them dozed off and turned the night into an inadvertent sleepover. Devon had always been a restless sleeper. Will had lost count of the number of times he’d woken up to Devon clinging to him, and after his first few attempts at shoving him off, Will had decided it was easier to let him sleep. Even with the heat it added to the already-sweltering summer nights, Devon sleep-hanging on him wasn’t as bad as that guilty look he got on his face when Will woke him up by disentangling himself.

God, he was an idiot. How had he gone this long without realizing his best friend had a raging crush on him? He remembered, without meaning to, the night last September they’d stayed up until three in the morning talking, and then not talking, the conversation fading into the kind of easy silence that signaled a tacit agreement to sleep soon. Then Devon blurted out, “You heard what Dominic said to me today?”

“Yeah.” The whole school had heard, pretty much. It wasn’t like it was the first time Dominic had been an asshole. “He’s full of shit. Don’t let him get to you.” Devon didn’t answer. “He called Carlos a fag last week because the guy bothers to shower more than once a week, all right? It doesn’t mean anything.”

 “All right,” Devon murmured, and shrunk back in on himself. Will hadn’t known what he did wrong at the time, but looking back he wanted to shake his own shoulders and yell about what an _idiot_ he was. Wanted to put his hand on Devon’s arm and kiss him there in his too-hot bedroom, before he’d sold away so much that the fumbling hands and barely-touching lips felt innocent in comparison.

“I love him,” he whispered, just to hear the words, and it felt like a promise and a curse and falling into something he barely understood. Devon mumbled in his sleep, and rolled back to the other side of the bed.

~~~

Nothing changed, or maybe everything changed. They went on laughing at johns and falling asleep curled up together under the stained and rumpled blanket.  They scraped together enough money to pay for the second month in the motel, and the third, and the fourth. It took a week for Will to work up the nerve to kiss Devon again, and a month to actually _talk_ to him about it.

Mostly, they pretended that nothing had happened. Devon never talked about anything that meant anything anyway, even before they’d run away, and Will didn’t want to ruin things. He didn’t ask how long Devon had been waiting to tell him, or how his brother found out, or if Devon woke up at night with this crushing sadness about how things could have been if they’d figured this out earlier, too. He stopped talking about home altogether, and sometimes it felt like ‘home’ might mean something different now, a tiny motel room with smoke-stained wallpaper and cockroaches running across the floor.

Things were going well, until they weren’t. Until it rained for three weeks straight and Will didn’t feel dry even when he was inside, and they went three days without food because it was that or get kicked out of the motel, and he made the mistake of saying that sometimes he thought he should just go home.

“We can’t go back,” Devon said.

“ _You_ can’t go back.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Will knew he should stop, before he said something he couldn’t take back. But he’d spent his whole life making sure he didn’t say the wrong thing around Devon, and right now he couldn’t remember why it was worth it. “Exactly what it sounds like. I’ve got somewhere to go home to. Just because you’re too scared to go running back to your brother doesn’t mean I should throw my life away.”

“Fine, then.” Devon wouldn’t look at him. “I’m not going to stop you from leaving.”

~~~

 Will got three blocks from the motel before he turned around. Devon was already gone. The bed felt too big that night.

~~~

Devon snuck into the room the next morning, like he thought he could slip into bed before Will woke up and it’d be like nothing had happened the night before. Like Will hadn’t been waiting up for the click of the key in the lock, watching sunlight creep into the room and fighting back thoughts of Devon dead in an alley somewhere.

“What are you doing?”

Will wanted to be angry, but Devon was talking like he was about to break. “Waiting for you, dumbass. Where _were_ you?”

“I thought you’d be gone.” Devon let out a tiny, choked sob. “I didn’t want to see the empty room, because that would mean it was true, and I don’t know what I would do without you. I thought you would leave!”

“Well, I didn’t.” There was an emptiness in the air where Will’s _and I won’t leave, ever_ might have fit, if things had been different. He might have said it anyway, even if it was a lie, just to see Devon’s face light up. But he’d figure out it was a lie, if not now, then when Will finally worked up the nerve to go home. The truth was better, even if it meant seeing his face harden when he realized what Will wasn’t going to say.

“Yeah.” Devon hid his disappointment well, at least. “Thanks.”

~~~

Nights like these, the wind cut right through to your bones. Will curled himself smaller on the bus-stop bench. It took a bitter cold to get him wishing for the filthy quilt back in their motel room. Devon was keeping his right side warm at least, snoring a bit into his shoulder. Thank God he was asleep, or he’d be jumping around the bench like a squirrel on Ritalin, leaving Will to freeze. Asleep, Devon was almost peaceful, excepting his death grip on Will’s fingers.

Nights like these, it was hard to forget that Will still had a home, only a few bus stops away. He pried himself free from Devon’s grasp, as gentle as he could manage, and checked his watch. In about ten minutes, a bus would pull up right here. If he closed his eyes he could picture it, the door swinging open, ready to take him back to a world without stained blankets and dirty old men and cockroaches crawling across the bathroom floor. Without sleeping curled up in the center of the motel bed, and laughing at not-funny jokes. Without Devon.

Will looked back at the boy sleeping on the bench, watched his hand twitch like he was grabbing for something. He heard the hydraulic hiss of the bus approaching, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn away. One more night. It was almost summer, when the bite would be gone from the air.

Somewhere close, a car horn blasted, and Devon scrambled upright. “What’s up, Will?” He sounded half-asleep.

“Nothing. Had to piss, is all.” The bus came, and went, and Will couldn’t turn around and face it. He didn’t think he could stand there and watch that door open and not get on. He didn’t think he could sit there on the bus and watch Devon grow smaller and smaller through the window either, though. _I thought you would leave_ , he heard, clear as if Devon had actually said it.

“Still haven’t,” he muttered, low enough that Devon couldn’t hear. _And I never will_. It almost fit, now, but the weight of it dragged at him. _One more night_ felt better. He settled back onto the bench, leaning against Devon, and whispered, “One more night,” like he had last night, and the night before. Just one more night.


End file.
